Conveyors today find wide usage in conveying articles successively from one location to another. With some conveyor systems the regularity of article timing, spacing and orientation, and of individual article condition or quality, is of little importance during conveyance since ultimately the articles are collected in gross at a delivery station. With other conveyor systems, however, more control and order is necessary to insure that only articles of an acceptable grade or quality are conveyed to a delivery station or that some degree of regularity be maintained. For example, in some cases quality control examinations are conducted while the articles are on a conveyor with only those articles passing examination being immediately packaged upon delivery from the conveyor. In other cases articles are collected at a delivery station in a preselected arrangement as in a stack upon a pallet. In still other cases a selected orientation of the articles on the conveyor itself must be maintained since otherwise the articles may jam the conveyor or even fall from it. In such situations apparatuses can be devised using sensors and movable baffles and the like to assure that a proper article spacing and orientation be maintained. These apparatuses however can be costly, complex and unreliable. Furthermore, where the conveyor extends a substantial distance, or is comprised of several independent sections, such article spacing and orienting apparatuses must often be duplicated at several points along the conveyor line.
One manner in which the just described problem can be alleviated is to incorporate into the conveyor system a distribution station where articles may be selectively removed from a conveyor rather than be relocated and oriented with respect to adjacent articles. Exemplary of article distributors are those apparatuses disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,581,892 and 3,782,540. With these types of distributors a section of the conveyor itself is made pivotal. By pivoting the section between raised and lowered positions articles may be selectively dropped from that conveyor onto another, or grouped together.
Though suitable in certain applications, the sectional displacement approach is not always feasible. For example, sometimes it it is impractical to provide the constant surveilance necessary to initiate quick action. In other words a slow response time is desired to enable an observer to perform other work simultaneously. The continual movement of a section of the conveyor itself also leads to maintenance and reliability problems. Furthermore, where the articles are quite rugged and heavy the reliability and ruggedness versus quick response requirements presents a distinct dilemma in designing the movable conveyor section. It thus would be desirable to provide article distributing apparatus for distributing articles being successively moved along a conveyor without a section of the conveyor itself having to be rendered temporarily disjoined from the conveyor line.